Attendance Policy

As a professor I'm actually mandated by campus safety procedures to take attendance each class, in case there is some emergency (fire, earthquake etc.) and emergency responders need to know who was in the building. I know that a number of your other professors don't do this, but I do.

That aside, teaching occurs in the active give and take of a classroom situation -- if it did not, we'd all stay home and read books and watch films by ourselves. This is particularly true of a seminar, in which much of learning occurs as an interactive group experience (or at least that is the ideal).

Also, given that this class only meets once a week, missing a class is a serious problem in terms of your ability to understand what is happening in the course. So please make every effort to attend class.